Blue Valentine

I couldn’t wait for Blue Valentine to end.  The film, composed as a juxtaposition between the blossoming romance of a young couple and the stagger toward divorce of that same couple a few years on, felt too authentic, too sharp.  I felt like I was privy to the bedroom conversations of real people, and I felt like I was sticking my nose in their business.

Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play the couple in two phases of their lives: young people with poor life management skills and older people with poor communications skills.  As young people, Williams is the kind of woman who chooses the wrong men, and Gosling is the kind of man who can unwittingly destroy the dreams of a smart, ambitious woman.  As older people, they’re a couple who talk past one another, who drink too much, who have become poison.  These were the kind of people I avoided when I was in my twenties, and they’ve grown into the kind of people I avoid in my forties.  I wanted nothing to do with either of them.

Williams and Gosling are very good at playing their roles, but they played people I didn’t want to be around.  I didn’t want to watch them fall in love because, even without the spoiler built into the film’s structure, I knew how things would work out for them.  I didn’t want to watch their relationship fall apart because I felt like that was their personal business and I shouldn’t get involved.

To steal a phrase from the brilliant Les Phillips, I think that Blue Valentine was the best Blue Valentine it could be.  But given the choice, I’d rather not have spent two hours with these people.